Mozilla Developing New Web To Push Technology

As well as launching a new update process and add-on synchronisation to their Firefox browser. Mozilla has also unveiled this week a new technology they have been developing that will enable websites to notify visitors that updates have been made to the site.

The new Mozilla API currently being developed works like this: The process starts with the Web site getting a URL where it can send notifications to the user. The URL points to the notification service, which is a secret between the user and the site. Then, the site sends a notification to the service. The service then delivers the message to the browser.

The new Push API notifications being developed by Mozilla are an easy way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not visiting the site. Jeff Balogh explains:

“The notification API lives at navigator.notification. First we find the right API object and check that it exists. If it’s there we ask the user for permission to send notifications using notification.requestRemotePermission(), which returns an object we use to watch for events.

Once the notification is in the system, we’ll deliver it to the recipient on all the devices they have Firefox installed, but we’ll try not to show duplicate notifications on different devices.”

iOS and Android devices already currently support their own push notification services, but Mozilla are looking to make notifications available to the whole web.